February 2015

02/25/2015

On Wednesday, February 18, the Madison Economic Development Commission discussed an ordinance proposed by Alder Weier that would create a protected class for homeless people in the areas of employment and housing. (Audio of the meeting and a recap can be found here.) This ordinance would specifically exclude protections for the homeless while using public accommodations. The justification for this exemption, according to Weier, is a few cases of people (who may or may not have even been homeless) who committed misdemeanors near the Capitol. Her stated reason for wanting to protect people in housing and employment, on the other hand, was that people need jobs and housing in order to get out of homelessness. She was curiously silent on how they would get their most immediate needs met, while still homeless, if denied public accommodations. This exemption certainly aligns with downtown business interests that wish to enforce their many existing anti-homeless policies, such as individual stores banning people perceived as homeless (which already violate laws protecting personal appearance) and groups of businesses working together with police and Downtown Madison, Inc. to enforce collective bans against individuals.

Alder John Strasser was opposed to this ordinance altogether, and cited his own membership in a protected class (being a gay man) as a reason for denying the credibility or importance of adding new protected classes, such as homelessness. He said that adding more classes “dilutes” anti-discrimination laws, and he wondered how long it would be “before anyone can find some way of getting on the protected classes list.”

Alders Weier and Strasser seemed to misunderstand two fundamental aspects of discrimination law: First, that being a member of a protected class does not mean you cannot still be prosecuted for criminal behavior; and second, that everyone belongs, in some way, to every protected class. It is when someone is targeted as a member of that class that it constitutes discrimination. The purpose of these laws is to recognize both historical and contemporary disenfranchisement, but the laws protect everyone -- including those in the majority.

The following letter was written by Anders Zanichkowsky, a housing advocate and another openly gay man, who shares many intersections of privilege with Alder John Strasser, in response to his comments at last Tuesday’s meeting. It was forwarded to all alders, the mayor, and staff at OutReach, Inc., Madison’s LGBT community center.

February 19, 2015

Dear Mr. Strasser:

I am writing as one gay man to another, in response to your recent comments about discrimination, homelessness, and public accommodations in Madison. I am strongly in favor of protecting homeless people from all forms of discrimination, especially in public accommodations. Being gay is at the heart of my support for this, and I’d like you to know why.

For me, it begins with honoring a legacy. The Stonewall Riots – and the Gay Rights Movement – were started by transgender women of color who struggled with homelessness, women like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Miss Major. For many people, the Stonewall Inn and the Compton Cafeteria were some of the only safe places to be at night. Thus, safety in public accommodations was a top priority for the transgender, homeless activists who created what would become the Gay Rights Movement.

Sylvia Rivera

Today, you and I both enjoy a relative amount of privilege as gay men, compared to the past and also to LGBT people now who are women, people of color, or homeless, for example. This is true even though many of our freedoms were won by their struggle. At the same time, other privileges you and I enjoy come directly at the expense of other LGBT people who do not have the same social, economic, and institutionalized power we have as white, middle class, college educated men. This idea of interconnected forms of oppression is sometimes called kyriarchy, an idea which greatly helped me understand my role as both a privileged and marginalized person in the world.

Consider the fact that we can go to a drag show at a gay bar raising money for the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, without fearing a violent police raid. Yet people of color, homeless people, and transgender people are disproportionately more likely to need ARCW’s services, because of the ways transphobia, racism, and sexism put people at greater risk of poverty and HIV infection. Or, consider the homophobic hatred of effeminate men: This is rooted in a hatred of femininity and sexism that will disproportionately harm women and girls, in addition to many gay men. You asked whether including more people among protected classes would "dilute" the meaning. I say: Absolutely not. Rather, it enlightens the meaning.

To refer back to the example you gave at the Economic Development Commission meeting last night, if either of us were to lose our current housing, no doubt we could again stay in the comfort of a friend's guest bedroom. A black lesbian in Dane County, being far more likely to live in poverty, is far less likely to have this option, knowing few (if any) people who would have room for her, or could support her without risking eviction from their own landlord. As a woman, she is also more likely to be supporting any children she might have, which adds to her barriers. And, even if you or I did need to stay in a homeless shelter, you would still enjoy privileges as a man which I do not, being that I am also transgender. This is a fact I would not be able to hide in a communal shower, where I would face an immediate risk of violence and bigotry.

I am offering these examples as proof of what Audre Lorde said: That “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” This is true whether or not the "issue" in question puts us in the minority, as gay men, or puts us in the powerful majority, as men who are not homeless.

It is for this reason I was so disheartened to hear you invoke your gay identity last night as some kind of credential for denying someone else’s oppression. You spoke of protected classes in "Zero Sum" terms, as though there is a limited quantity of justice in the world and, having been served our full, gay men should not have to extend the offer to others who were late to the table.

First, ending discrimination against the homeless is not a new goal. And as I see it, one of the reasons homeless people still don't have a seat at the "Protected Classes" table is because gay, middle class, white men like us do not always see our struggles bound up with homeless issues. Instead, privileged gay people kicked women like Sylvia Rivera out of what was once a grassroots movement. Now we have groups like the Human Rights Campaign, paid for with blood money from vulture funds, and the privileged gays who dictate the priorities of the mainstream Gay Rights Movement are using the radical legacy of Stonewall to fight for private property rights – whether their own, through marriage equality, or through US imperialism, by gaining access to the military.

These private property interests, like the ones you want to protect in Madison, are in direct conflict with social justice and sustainable economic development. We need only look to the LGBTQ youth still being kicked out of their homes and forced into crimes of poverty for survival to see how your pro-business interests will hurt LGBTQ people, among many others, and place this burden on tax payers in the form of emergency and social services. In Chicago’s Boystown in 2011, gay men who look very much like you and me tried to shut down an LGBT community center for homeless youthfor fear it was bringing down their property values. Your comments have reflected similar values, wherein property is more important than people, and the work of eliminating discrimination is considered done, against all evidence to the contrary. Just like in Boystown, at the EDC meeting discussing homelessness as a protected class, some alders used singular examples of criminal behavior to demonize an entire group of disenfranchised people and to argue the dangers of affording them basic civil liberties. Is that not the first red flag of prejudice?

I am calling on you to see how the liberation of homeless people from poverty and discrimination is deeply connected to our own liberation as gay men. I urge you to reconsider your position, and protect homeless people from discrimination while using public accommodations. For one thing, the public is where the homeless are forced to live most of their daily life, due to their poverty, increasing the impact of discrimination against them in public places. For another, the only arguments against this protection rely on the same anti-homeless prejudice the ordinance claims to protect people from in the areas of employment and housing.

02/20/2015

When I jog my usual three mile loop, huffing and puffing alongside Lake Monona from my apartment at the corner of Baldwin and Morrison to the park adjacent to Olbrich Botanical Gardens and back, I pass at least four little free libraries. They serve as good landmarks, and I often think about them as I run. In the last few years, more than a few have sprung up within a few square miles of my apartment on the near-east side of Madison. Each is unique and almost all are as beautiful as the houses they sit in front of, perched on sturdy poles. One is tall, narrow, and brown, sharing the color of its owner's house but not its shape. Its two shelves are like two storeys in the kind of house you might see in the illustration of a childrens book. Across the street, in front of a house that sits on lakefront property, there is a little library with a distinctly modernist design. A miniature version of the owner's house, whose mid-century modernist architecture is less common around here than it is in other affluent neighborhoods in Madison, it features a roof with two slants that do not intersect and a striking white coat of paint. The third little library is an even more detailed miniature, complete with a gabled window, brick foundation, and shingles and siding that match the house in whose lovingly tended garden it sits. Each one was crafted with care and no small quantity of ingenuity, and their structures are lovingly maintained.

Littlefreelibrary.org calls the little library "a gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories." While I do not regularly monitor my neighbors' activities, I have never witnessed such a gathering in the proximity of a little library. In fact, I have never opened one, let alone borrowed or donated a book, and I have rarely witnessed others doing so. For me and I expect many of my neighbors, these little libraries are purely symbolic, representing important components of our collective self-image as a well educated and left leaning community while serving no practical purpose, either as a hub for social interactions or for the circulation of books and stories. Little libraries could not replace big ones, nor are they intended to; they are supplements, bringing the big libraries closer to hearth and home. The abundance of little libraries in this neighborhood signals our commitment to sharing and literacy as values we hold in common. To newcomers and visitors, the little libraries are signs that say, "Book lovers lurk here."

When someone writes the history of the architecture of the neoliberal era, a photograph of a little library might serve as a better cover image than a picture of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which Fredric Jameson discusses at length in his classic analysis of the period, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. For what structure unique to this period better encapsulates the privatization of everything, the erosion of our social fabric, and the ascendancy of the rational self-interested individual that are the hallmarks of this period? We live in a time when, rather than pooling our resources to build spaces where people can gather in large numbers to share their love of books and the arts, we lovingly craft shoebox sized bookshelves that look like our houses, put them on sticks, and leave a few books in them, usually ones we don't actually want. Little libraries do not revive a nostalgic vision of the neighborhood library so much as they preserve it in aspic.

When I worked at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, we received many book donations. They were designated for our shelves or for one of the "books to prisoners" projects that lived in our basement. Often, the boxes potential donors hefted out of their cars contained only the books that they couldn't sell to used book dealers, books that dealers won't buy because no one actually wants, outdated instructor's copies containing the answers to questions in textbooks discontinued long ago or manuals for outdated versions of Microsoft Office. When we refused such donations, suggesting their owners take them to the dump to be recycled, they would become indignant, holding up the answer book for an algebra textbook last used in the late 1970s and saying, in a voice passionate enough that they almost sounded sincere, "But these are books! You can't throw away books!" Many little libraries have become depositories for such books, saving their original owners a trip to the dump and giving them the profound sense of wellbeing one gets whenever one donates a book, no matter if it's clearly worthless to anyone who actually reads. Considered in this light, little free libraries take their rightful place, alongside the ice bucket challenge and buying coffee for the next person in line at Starbucks, in the growing catalogue of empty gestures we call "giving back" or "paying it forward."

The little libraries in my neighborhood will probably survive the people who built them, but will they survive as monuments to their builders' community spirit and bibliophilia or as tombstones for the library itself, one of the last and most persistent remnants of the commons, or, indeed, to the printed book, whose death has been forecast more than once in recent memory? Maybe they are not monuments or tombstones at all but rather shrines to the printed library book, whose touch, with its special binding and covers, can trigger memories of libraries from our childhoods, memories of sharing, abundance, and limitless possibility? As libraries shaped like houses, they also remind us that the books we read and love are houses in which we live and into which, sometimes willfully and sometimes unaware, we disappear.

02/14/2015

Karma Chávez's speech from the Save UW Rally held on library mall on February 14, 2015:

In 2011, the State of Wisconsin crossed an awful threshold as spending for the Department of Corrections surpassed spending on the UW System. The state also spends three times the amount on each person it locks up as it does on each student in our K-12 schools. Apparently the only public that Governor Walker is interested in preserving is public corrections, also known as the prison industrial complex. In the state of Wisconsin, in the academic year 2014-2015, the UW system reports there are 5,621 African American students enrolled of over 180,000 students total. That amounts to just 3% of the student body population. Meanwhile, UW Milwaukee's Lois Quinn and John Pawasarat report that in the state of Wisconsin 13% of adult African American men are incarcerated and over 40% of the prison population in Wisconsin is Black while Blacks make up around 5% of the population of the state. And I also hope I don’t need to remind you that the 2011 slashing of public sector unions had a disproportionate impact on Black folks in Wisconsin who are over-represented in public sector unions nationwide. Simply put, this budget is the latest in a series of policy decisions that reflect state-sanctioned violence and that violence has disproportionate impacts on people of color in the state of Wisconsin, particularly Black people.

Today, we need to do defend the University of Wisconsin, but we need to be sure not to isolate these attacks on public education from attacks on our communities more broadly. We are in Dane County right now, which is one of the most progressive places to live in the entire United States. The University of Wisconsin Madison is known as one of the most progressive universities in the country. But these facts are not true for people of color. Dane County has the worst racial disparities between blacks and whites in the entire United States of America, and a once storied Afro-American Studies department at UW Madison has been slowly choked over the past decade and now told its survival is only viable via dismantling through consolidation with the other ethnic studies programs on campus. I say all of this to insist that we not simply defend the status quo that has always only worked for the few. But that we use this as an opportunity to see how all of these forms of state violence are connected and to demand that our public institutions are supported, and reoriented to serve those most impacted by violent systems.

This means insisting that that the UW system remain a public university and not a public authority. This means insisting that UW is not slashed to preserve a neoliberal program of austerity and tax cuts for the wealthy promoted by Walker and the GOP. This means not separating out UW Madison from the rest of the system in our analysis, but staying in the fight together. This means listening to and supporting our classified staff and letting them lead the way as they will be the ones impacted most. This means supporting our students of color on campus, who suffer the daily experience of micro and macro aggression. This means supporting contingent faculty and walking out on February 25th as a part of the National Adjunct Walkout Day. This means supporting the Young Gifted and Black Coalition locally, and your own local Black Lives Matter movement to end police brutality, mass incarceration, and the slow and fast forms of state violence that destroy our communities. We need the UW, but we need all forms of state violence to end and we can only do that together. Build the schools, not the jails!